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Intact America announces the launch of AdverseChildhoodExperiences.net , a new website designed to encourage researchers and public health agencies to include child genital cutting in the standard ACEs questionnaire. Together with the simultaneous release of an auto-scoring ACEs quiz mobile app (in Android and iOS ), this new tool expands resources available for practitioners who treat victims of childhood trauma. This initiative was inspired when Dan Bollinger, an independent men’s issues...

The traumatized child will present extreme problem symptoms (i.e., self-harm, depression, aggression, suicidal thoughts, etc.) when they first enter treatment. Without specialized tools, the therapist will often only treat the child’s symptoms (the weeds) and not impact the underlying causes or undercurrents (the roots) of the trauma. When this happens, relapse in trauma treatment is high. In response, the FST| Family Systems Trauma Model uses the techniques of feedback loops to help your...

By Jenn Jacome, Hello Woodlands, August 12, 2019 Nearly two years after the historic rainfall and flooding of Hurricane Harvey, Texas Children’s Harvey Resiliency and Recovery Program is assessing and treating more children than it did in the six to eight months immediately following the storm. “Currently, we’re seeing about 250 kids per month in our Trauma and Grief Center overall when you look at new assessments and those coming in for return appointments, and many of these children were...

By Karen Coates and Valeria Fernandez, Pacific Standard, July 9, 2019 It was the last day of March of 2018, the day before Easter, the season of onions. By mid-morning, 16-year-old Berenise had already loaded a few pails. She held sharp, rusty shears that demanded careful precision; one slip, and they could take a finger. Berenise worked alongside her 10-year-old brother, Salvador, and her parents a few paces away. Sunlight beamed across mile after mile of flat green fields, broken only by a...

By Connie L. Habash, PsychCentral, July 13, 2019 On the path of growth and spiritual development, we often become increasingly attuned to others and our world. Our ability to feel compassion deepens. Concerns about war in the middle east, human trafficking, global warming, and poaching of elephants for their ivory tusks, among many other issues, may weigh heavily on our hearts. As we heal our own inner pain, we may simultaneously be feeling the suffering of others. This can cause us to take...

By Alonzo L. Plough, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, July 29, 2019 Three years ago, it dawned on me that the concept of “well-being” might lead to a world of learning opportunities that could deepen and broaden the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's (RWJF) work to build a Culture of Health. I was in Copenhagen, at the World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe, for a meeting about the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and developing measures for well-being. As I listened,...

By Inyoung Kang, The New York Times, August 12, 2019 Nestled in the scenic hills across the bay from San Francisco, the heavily white enclave of Sausalito is home to a thriving, racially and economically integrated charter school. And about a mile away, in the more diverse community of Marin City, is an overwhelmingly black and Hispanic public school. This division within the Sausalito Marin City School District was intentional, the state Justice Department found after a two-year...

By Kira Lerner, The Appeal, August 5, 2019 A new report shows that a progressive approach, like the one advanced by Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx, can help decrease jail populations--and crime. Incarceration has long been touted as a necessary deterrent to crime. But across the country, just the opposite is proving true: Progressive prosecutors are successfully reducing incarceration without any corresponding increase in crime rates. In Chicago, crime is dropping. According to a new...

By Kim Eckart, UW News, June 4, 2019 Experiences such as poverty, residential instability, or parental divorce or substance abuse, also can lead to changes in a child’s brain chemistry, muting the effects of stress hormones. These hormones rise to help us face challenges, stress or to simply “get up and go.” Together, these impacts to executive function and stress hormones create a snowball effect, adding to social and emotional challenges that can continue through childhood. A new...

[Editor's note: Dr. Harise Stein at Stanford University edits a web site -- abuseresearch.info -- that focuses on the health effects of abuse, and includes research articles on ACEs. Every month, she's posting the summaries of the abstracts and links to research articles that address only ACEs. Thank you, Harise!! — Jane Stevens] Clemens V, Berthold O, Witt A, et. al. Child maltreatment is mediating long-term consequences of household dysfunction. Eur Psychiatry. 2019 May;58:10-18. PMID:...

By Julie Bosman, Kate Taylor, and Tim Arango, The New York Times, August 10, 2019 The man who shot nine people to death last weekend in Dayton, Ohio, seethed at female classmates and threatened them with violence. The man who massacred 49 people in an Orlando nightclub in 2016 beat his wife while she was pregnant, she told authorities. The man who killed 26 people in a church in Sutherland Springs, Tex., in 2017 had been convicted of domestic violence. His ex-wife said he once told her that...

By Chloe Demrovsky, Forbes, August 10, 2019 One week ago, America yet again faced tragedy as gunmen in two unrelated incidents shot into crowds at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas and an active nightlife area in Dayton, Ohio. The combined death toll stands at 31. The nation is in near perpetual mourning and grim about the prospect of facing more mass shootings. Terrorism, whether domestic or international, has a broad effect on our collective wellbeing that extends far beyond the immediate...